It's funny, staring out of this window. Just this simple gesture symbolises how lost I am in the world. I was only seeing through barred windows the fresh air so alien to me.
I had always known that I was different. I realised that when I was around 5, when I set my wardrobe on fire. My parents thought I had gone insane, because I was sitting inside it.
I never meant for that to happen, I had only wanted to feel the flames, breathe in the heat, just forget everything and let the pain fill me up. I never meant to scare anyone. I ended up spending the next two years in Archwood Mental Institution. They were the start of 7 lonely years. When I was first admitted aged 5, I was the youngest person to have ever been admitted into that Institution, they held constant tests on me, and I had to be kept under 24 hour surveillance.
At first all the doctors and nurses were really kind and nice to me, but when I started to be awkward, uncooperative, and difficult. They increasingly locked me into my room, or as I came to call it – my cell. I got used to seeing the white walls and the clean crisp sheets instead of my bedroom. I didn't feel like myself in hospital, I felt like I was losing me, drowning in the whiteness and disinfectant, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was just another patient, not a person who had feelings.
My parents did come and see me, almost constantly for the start but when it became clear that I was going to be spending along time in the institution and I wasn't normal there visits became shorter and less frequent.
I knew they didn't want me. They didn't want a freak for a daughter. They didn't want people to know about me. They saw me as black mark on pristine white paper. The worst thing to deal with was the fact that when they told me on the hospital phone that they would come and visit me at a certain date, I believed them. I would sit and wait for them the whole day, until it registered that they wouldn't come.
I was rejected, and no longer important. They didn't want me. Up until then according to my doctors I had been improving. When I was allowed to go home one weekend, my mother declined- saying she didn't want me in the house because she thought I was going to harm my 3 month old baby brother.
It was then that I realised how naïve I had been, thinking that my family cared about me, I was a freak, harmful, dangerous. They didn't want anything to do with me.
A few months later, they moved away to the other side of the country.
When I was 7, I got moved to West-Ridge Institution. I hated it there. They were so inconsiderate of my feelings and my age. They liked to use physical punishment on me, when I did not obey, or was difficult. One time the beating was so bad, I ended up with severe internal beating, my crime- asking my nurse for a toy.
Not one doctor or nurse realised that I was hurting inside and that I couldn't control my outbursts, and when I did have them I didn't mean them. They also didn't realise that if they had treated me with a little respect and gave me some time, I would have improved. When I was at West-Ridge one time, this nurse was being so malicious and cruel to this small boy about 3, I couldn't help it – I just lifted my hands and somehow pushed her out of a 7 storey building. I didn't kill her but I seriously hurt her. I never meant to. I was just so angry. All I could feel was the rejection of my parents, the cruelty from the nurses, abandonment and loneliness.
After that, I got moved into a secure compound – It was like a prison. I didn't understand what had happened to me, why wasn't I normal. I never saw another child, apart from that boy that one time. What was wrong with me- i wondered? I frequently at the compound became suicidal. I wanted to die, and live again – have a right life, not the one I had. When I was 8 I tried to commit suicide 5 times in 3 months. I hated myself even more after the last attempt because I couldn't even succeed in dying.
It was then that they started giving me pills, and keeping me sedated. I was much easier to handle like that, because they couldn't have me successfully dying at the compound – their reputation would have been in tatters.
All I remember is floating in and out of conscious, only to see a nurse press another injection into my arm.
I didn't see black when I closed my eyes. I saw colours; pretty colours, playful colours, harmful colours, and dangerous colours. I was subject to where theses colours would lead me, to dreams of my home and my room, or to the feeling of abandonment sitting alone in a black room, and the only light slowly flickering out.
The colours were kind but cruel, sweet and back-stabbing. They lulled me in with a poisoned sweet. They were always a Catch 22.
"They hovered, strangling my mind, within blind delusions. They destroyed any joy I held on to, as I became deluded. They plunged me within my vial grave, as I crumbled I faded. Stenches of death overwhelmed, I twisted within my grave.
Bones of my flesh protruded, I rotted within my delusional fate."
